I’ve seen this a lot on this thread, but this is Apple we’re talking about. They have billions of dollars to throw at making their memory compression far better than what’s on Linux. I still regularly use an 8gb ddr3 apple macbook air from 2017. It’s not as fast at computing as my 32gb windows laptop, but it feels more snappy. I also have a 16gb desktop, also windows, and the macbook feels just a little slower than that. A little. And it’s ddr3 vs ddr4
I hear this a lot, I’ve not known a single person who has considered it a status thing. There are people who have cheap phones from both apple and android and they were made fun of for the price of the phone, not the bubble color. iMessage just made it much nicer to talk to people. “I can send messages over wifi!” made it so you could send messages in school or anywhere with a big metal roof. “The images are better!” These were limitations of the SMS standard that Apple designed around. Now? Yeah, there’s other options, but back then iMessage made its hold by being able to be used by people who couldn’t use SMS or didn’t want to for whatever reason